So You Think You Can Paint

Editor’s Note: On March 10, 2014, journalist Matthew Power lost his life pursuing a story along the Nile River in Uganda. He left behind a body of work as diverse and compelling as the adventures, tragedies, and passions of his subjects. To honor Matt—and to encourage young writers to pursue new stories—the Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University has been established. A generous anonymous donor has offered to match all gifts contributed to the endowment, up to a total of $50,000, between now and October 22—what would have been Matt’s 40th birthday. DONATE NOW.

On a beautiful afternoon last September, upon arriving in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, I was greeted by a giant steel praying mantis. It towered twenty feet over a parking lot and appeared to be engaged in a staring contest with the butterfly welded to its foreleg. Nearby, at a park beside the Grand River, a crowd had gathered around a twelve-foot-tall sculpture, titled Rusty, of a ball-chasing puppy assembled out of tree trunks, car parts, and rusted farm implements. Families posed for pictures, and children swung from its oil-barrel snout.

Everywhere I went, throngs of viewers milled about, appraising works of art like fairgoers sampling sideshows at a carnival.

Grand Rapids, a tidy conservative antithesis to Detroit, 150 miles to the east, is not what we think of when we think of the art world. Its preponderance of evangelical churches has earned it the nickname G.R.-usalem. And yet every September since 2009, it’s played host to the event I’d come to witness, ArtPrize. Any adult who pays the $50 entry fee and finds space at a downtown venue can compete for the grand prize of $250,000, a colossal sum in the world of art competitions. The Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize is $100,000; the career-making Turner Prize is $40,000. This year’s ArtPrize had attracted more than 1,500 competitors from forty-three states and thirty-six countries. Their work could be seen at over a hundred different venues, from public art museums to sidewalks, churches, coffee shops, bars, pizza joints, even a police station. But what’s most extraordinary about ArtPrize isn’t the jackpot or the provincial setting. What’s most extraordinary is the jury: Anyone 16 or older who comes to Grand Rapids for the occasion can be on it. The winner is chosen by popular vote.

And so, like carnival barkers or strip-club promoters, many of the competitors stood beside their creations, doing their best to lure in passersby. They eagerly interpreted their work to all who would listen. ("The door," said the creator of a giant blue and white doorway perched on the river bank, "is kind of a metaphor for the doors that are opened in one’s mind when we strive to have a higher level of consciousness.") Many of the artists had printed up stacks of business cards to hand out, text-message voting codes prominently displayed. One installation piece consisted of nothing more than a graffiti-covered shipping container, inside which scantily clad waitresses plied the voting public with cocktails and beer while blasting Europe’s "The Final Countdown."

On a downtown sidewalk, a ponytailed Thai sculptor named Sunti Pichetchaiyakul was putting the finishing touches on a life-size fiberglass-resin sculpture of Gerald Ford, arms crossed, thoughtfully holding a pipe, a bemused smile frozen on his wan lips. Ford stood in glassy-eyed contemplation of a bronze bust of himself, also by the artist, mounted on a plinth. The work was titled President Gerald Ford Visits ArtPrize. Pichetchaiyakul didn’t speak English very well, but he clearly understood how to tailor his message to the electorate: Our thirty-eighth president was a native of Grand Rapids. I’d ridden in from Gerald R. Ford International on the Gerald R. Ford Freeway. As people stopped to photograph and compliment his work, the creator of President Gerald Ford Visits ArtPrize smiled shyly, completely guileless in his pandering.

Critics have derided ArtPrize as a naked bid to buy cultural cachet in a flyover-country backwater, and fans have hailed it as radically open, a populist wresting of aesthetic judgment from the snobbery of elites in New York and Los Angeles. The New York Times mocked it as "Art Idol." The critic Jerry Saltz called it "terrifying and thrilling" and wondered what effect such a model would have on the traditional bastions of art-world power. I shared Saltz’s wonderment, but even more than the event itself, what made me curious were the motives of the man behind it, a 30-year-old heir to a vast fortune named Rick DeVos.

DeVos’s 86-year-old grandfather, Rich DeVos, is the multibillionaire co-founder of Amway, the private multitiered marketing business that generates enormous wealth by selling products and training materials to gullible salespeople. Rick’s father, Dick, spent $35 million of his own money—and $6,800 in donations from Mitt and Ann Romney—on an unsuccessful 2006 bid to become Michigan’s Republican governor. Rick’s uncle is Erik Prince, the ex&#x2013;Navy Seal and billionaire founder of Blackwater, the private military-services firm now rebranded as Academi. The family comes from the ultraconservative Calvinist Christian Reformed Church, which stresses strict piety and devout entrepreneurialism, and through their political contributions and their various philanthropic foundations, the DeVoses have for decades quietly underwritten a mind-boggling array of free-market and evangelical-Christian causes. Pull back the curtain on a hot-button conservative issue, from anti-gay-marriage statutes to privatizing public education to the Citizens United case, and you’ll find the extended DeVos family.

In a 1997 op-ed in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, Rick’s mother, Betsy DeVos, made the quid pro quo aspect of their family’s political giving explicit. "I know a little something about soft money, as my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party," she wrote. "I have decided, however, to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect some things in return."

To some of the family’s detractors, the millions in soft money and the funding of conservative-Christian organizations with vague names (like the Council for National Policy, founded in 1981 by Left Behind author Tim LaHaye) suggest more ambitious goals: an end to nearly all government control and regulation, and the dawn of Christian dominion over all societal institutions: government, business, media, education...and the arts. Whatever their motives, it seemed odd that a family with such an agenda would let its heir apparent throw open the gates to its city in an open call to any and all artists, no matter how starving or unwashed.

Popular taste was the wild card of the contest, and it was fiendishly hard to interpret. Civic boosterism, not to mention a population infected with an incurable strain of Midwestern Nice, seemed to lend the event an air of relentless cheerfulness. The Grand Rapidians on the street did not, generally, want to talk smack about the art. One afternoon, I stood next to an elderly woman gazing at a palm tree constructed out of shredded Mountain Dew cans, hoping for a withering critique. "Oh boy," she said. "Looks like someone had to drink a lot of pop to make that!"

The first dissident native I managed to find was the anonymous author of a blog called ArtPrize Worst. Post after post mercilessly catalogued the crushing depths to which creative expression could sink in the quest for money and fame. A scantily clad Statue of Liberty flying Superman-style beside a soaring eagle. An evil clown astride a giant turtle. A papier-m&#xE2;ché diorama of Elvis, Michael Jackson, the Obamas, and Dog the Bounty Hunter. A wooden sculpture of Gollum. A giant penny made of pennies. A coffin made of cigarettes. A life-size cow made of tiny plastic cows.

Local sensitivities were gleefully mocked; explicitly religious-themed works were skewered by the blog. One of the most buzzed-about entries this year was a thirteen-foot-tall stained-glass mosaic by a California artist named Mia Tavonatti. Titled Crucifixion, it portrayed Christ on the cross, backlit by a Technicolor topical sunset. ArtPrize Worst described the piece as "Tim McGraw in a wig." Tavonatti had used a surfer friend as a model, which gave Christ an oddly supple athleticism, as though He were stretching out on a beach towel after a particularly debilitating bong rip.

I sent a message to the blogger behind ArtPrize Worst, and after I’d promised to protect his anonymity, he agreed to talk over the phone, a sort of Deep Throat with a Lake Wobegon twang. As it happened, he knew Rick DeVos—Grand Rapids is a small town—and DeVos even knew that he kept the blog but had admirably never outed him. Despite his scathing critique, the blogger supported the broader project of ArtPrize and believed strongly that every single piece, no matter how hideous, deserved to be in the contest. "The bad stuff that’s entered is a foil to the good stuff, like how you need bad guys to contend with superheroes," he told me. I asked him where he thought DeVos fit in his family’s larger cultural project. "He’s more a libertarian than social conservative. I think he wants to distance himself from their legacy." He paused, thought a moment, then added, "But he’s clearly part of them."

The anonymous blogger was the first dissident I found, but he was not alone. I later spoke to Anna Campbell, then an assistant professor of art and design at Grand Valley State University, who in the first year of ArtPrize had mounted a piece at Pub 43, a gay bar in downtown Grand Rapids. The work, titled The Seeding Project, included drink coasters printed with quotes, graphics, and statistics documenting the DeVos family’s funding of the fight against gay marriage. Campbell wanted to explore "the relationship between the gay community and conservative power structure." For an untenured art instructor, showing artwork critical of a family that had given millions to her university was a risky move. The chair of Campbell’s department e-mailed her to ask her to explain the work. There were no explicit threats; it was subtler than that. "Power is sometimes ercised in funny ways," said Campbell, and being asked by her superiors to explain her artwork created "a kind of chilling effect."

While Campbell admired some of the goals of ArtPrize, she was still mystified at DeVos’s motives. "Who is this guy and what is his impetus?" she said. "I can’t even begin to speculate."

Rick DeVos’s offices were in the Windquest Building, a historic brick-and-limestone edifice, retrofitted with an ultramodern glass-and-aluminum-clad addition, that serves as headquarters for the DeVos family’s various ventures. The building, like his parents’ investment company, is named after their eighty-six-foot racing yacht. Tall and broad-shouldered, with a scruff of beard, gel-mussed hair, and a hint of a sunglass tan suggesting a sunny afternoon out on the yacht, on the afternoon he met with me DeVos was dressed in his favored startup casual: untucked shirt beneath a zip sweater and skinny jeans.

He came across as personable and fairly well-adjusted for someone raised in a family of ultraconservative billionaires, in a town where numerous buildings bore his surname, and to whom his uncle Erik Prince had seemed a "Superman figure" growing up. But his family’s political proclivities were not something he liked to talk about much. "I don’t want to even weigh in on any of the political stuff," he told me, staring down at the table. "I just, yeah...I just prefer to stay away from that."

He was, however, happy to talk about film. One of his first web ventures was a social network for cinephiles. He gravitates toward art-house darlings like Wes Anderson and Terrence Malick. His initial idea for a cultural event in Grand Rapids was a film festival. But the logistics of starting a new festival in a very crowded field were daunting. So DeVos settled for art.

Many of DeVos’s start-up ventures have been influenced by the ideas of Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma. (Christensen’s theory of "disruptive innovation" describes the way new technologies or ideas can upend existing paradigms: think iPhones or Wikipedia or steamships.) DeVos insists that Christensen is not the "key that unlocks ArtPrize," but it is easy to view his experiment as an attempt to disrupt the art world, with its top-down business model that has stayed pretty much the same since, well, the Renaissance.

He’d always seen art prizes as a "cloistered affair," and his forays into tech startups had made him love the democracy of the Internet and the possibilities afforded by crowdsourcing. Why not a contest with an open call for artists and an open vote? "I was always intrigued with the X-Prize model," he said, referring to the $10 million prize offered for private-sector space flight. "This whole idea of putting a big prize out there and then putting as few rules around it as possible, not trying to dictate what the outcome should look like." The idea expanded from there, and in 2009, five months after he first announced it, ArtPrize opened to the public. Two hundred thousand people came that year, so many that across the city, restaurants ran out of food. DeVos was stunned when he looked out his office window and saw thousands of people in the streets gathered to watch a local artist release 100,000 paper airplanes from the rooftops of office buildings.

ArtPrize, DeVos insisted, was not about picking the best art but about creating a "conversation"—a favorite word of his—about art in his community. He knew there would always be "the guy in the parking lot with the chain-saw bear carvings," but it was all part of the experiment, even the terrible stuff. One of DeVos’s more revealing moments about his feelings on ArtPrize came in a speech before a group of students at Cornerstone University, an evangelical school in Grand Rapids. DeVos stood before an enormous projection screen with a PowerPoint of cheerfully Orwellian slogans flashing behind him: "You=Creator"; "Fun=Growth"; "Prize=Catalyst."

"I just want to see crazy crap all over Grand Rapids, and I think we’ve clearly achieved that," he announced. "You need ideas rubbing up against each other. You need ideas having sex with each other," he told the assembled faithful, who sat in polite—or possibly stunned—silence.

Were there limits to what DeVos called his "radically open" contest model, like art that pushed the socially conservative boundaries of Grand Rapids? Something like Andres Serrano’s infamous Piss Christ, a 1987 photograph of a plastic crucifix suspended in urine; or The Holy Virgin Mary, by Chris Ofili, a painting which had incorporated dried elephant dung and cutouts from porn magazines in its representation of the Madonna. Both works became lightning rods for conservative anger (throwing Jesse Helms and Rudy Giuliani into respective conniptions), and both have been vandalized. Could Grand Rapids be radically open enough to handle something like that? DeVos was unflappable: he told a local newspaper "I’d love there to be controversial art showing up. I’d love people to be upset."

I asked Rick DeVos about Anna Campbell’s project. He was unequivocal that no art should be prohibited, even if it were a direct attack on his family. "I’ve set the thing out so that’s how it works. That’s their right," DeVos told me, "If they can find people that want to work with them and host them, then that’s great." But that’s where self-censorship becomes an issue, according to Campbell. "A lot of real estate owners don’t want the DeVoses to be angry at them." Even outside the venues that receive direct philanthropic support from the DeVoses—that is, most arts and cultural institutions in Grand Rapids—there was little desire to rock the boat. When I asked DeVos to name a controversial contestant, he mentioned a 2009 entry in which George W. Bush’s portrait was done in toilet-paper rolls.

ArtPrize had recently received a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. I asked whether taking NEA money seemed ironic, given his family’s free-market leanings and general animosity toward government subsidizing. The Acton Institute, a Judeo-Christian free-market think tank based in Grand Rapids to which the DeVoses had donated, has advocated for the abolition of public funding of contemporary art. For DeVos, however, the NEA grant seemed more about the cred than the money, and he called it "a great statement of national validation."

So was the goal to be taken seriously by the art establishment or to ultimately displace it altogether? "I honestly don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the art world," he replied, though he still planned to attend Art Basel in 2011. "It’s not to suggest I’m creating some kind of war. My overall goal is building a creative culture in Michigan, and it’s all a method of trying a different path to get there. I wanted to do something different and weird. The industrial era was very good to us, but it’s very rigid, it’s very linear, it’s monolithic, and that’s not coming back." He looked at other midsize cities that have become hubs of culture and innovation—Portland, Austin, Boulder—and wanted to see that energy in Grand Rapids. "I’m more interested in that challenge. How do you create those sorts of centers? I see ArtPrize as my creative act."

Not all of this year’s competitors were fortune-seeking amateurs or skillful confectioners of derivative kitsch. The event had also attracted serious professionals from the loftier precincts of the art establishment, professionals like Alois Kronschlaeger, an Austrian by way of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Kronschlaeger met me at the door of Site:Lab, a huge gutted building on the outskirts of downtown. In jeans and a black T-shirt, his salt-and-pepper hair swept theatrically back from a high forehead, he seemed like what a New Yorker would assume people from Grand Rapids think all European avant-garde artists are like.

He and a group of volunteers had spent the previous six weeks installing a seventy-two-foot-tall 3-D gridwork of two-by-two lumber—more than two miles of it—assembled in what appeared to have been a torn-out elevator shaft at the building’s core. Called Spire, the piece plunged to the gloomy depths of the building’s basement and climbed in geometrical exactitude three stories up and out a hole in the roof. The wooden form was wrapped in a diaphanous skin of wire mesh over which a see-through paint had been poured like rainwater. As the afternoon light cut through the building, the piece was set aglow, and the overall effect was of an incandescent sort of architectural DNA spinning out through the roof. It was very cool.

With Spire as a central axis, eight other pieces filled out the space. A video artist with pieces acquired by MoMA had projected her work in the cavernous basement, and a Zen-like arrangement of stacked and powdered stone occupied the top floor. A piece by the sculptor David Bowen, called tele-present water, consisted of a red plastic lattice suspended from the ceiling, where a series of computer-driven robotic armatures telegraphed data from a buoy in the Pacific. When, thousands of miles away, a wave passed the buoy, the suspended grid would undulate in response. Each piece in the space contributed to a total reimagining of what had been a decaying abandoned building. It seemed to fulfill Ezra Pound’s mandate that modern art must "Make It New," a stark contrast with the nifty pabulum out in the streets.

Site:Lab was clearly the standard-bearer for complicated and challenging art in the contest, but would the voters get it? The curator of the exhibition space, a Grand Rapids local (with a decade in New York) named Paul Amenta, told me that one of his main goals was to educate the kind of people who normally would never venture into a place like this. "They want to learn about this stuff," he said. Of course, that didn’t mean they’d like it or take Amenta’s edifying lessons to heart. "That’s why Jerry Saltz called it ’terrifying and thrilling,’ " said Amenta. "The general public can really fuck this up. And ArtPrize is in some ways really terrified of that, because they don’t want some big crazy-ass thing to win."

That night, Site:Lab threw an opening party, and hundreds of people crowded the cavernous space as a DJ spun records. It could easily have passed for Berlin or Bushwick. A friend of Paul Amenta’s showed up, a local painter named Michael Pfleghaar, who introduced himself as "one of the few vocal opponents" of ArtPrize I would meet here. He ushered me behind the folds of Spire and spoke in a conspiratorial stage-whisper shout to be heard above the music, glancing around often to see if we were being watched. Pfleghaar gets depressed when the contest comes around. He entered the first year—every local artist he knew had—but became profoundly demoralized by the voting public’s choices. Tastes skewed toward "sideshow" work that was "technically really good but conceptually vacant," he told me.

Take, for instance, Open Water No. 24, the nineteen-foot oil triptych by Brooklyn artist Ran Ortner that won the first ArtPrize, in 2009. A brooding and luminous seascape of storm-tossed waves, the painting was technically masterful and monumental, which had proved to be a trend among the winners picked thus far. The second year’s top prize went to local artist Chris LaPorte for his twenty-eight-foot pencil drawing of a photograph, taken in 1921, of sixty-three cavalry officers. It was as though the public voted for the opposite of my kid could do that.

It was hard to knock ArtPrize for getting so many people engaged with art, but he deeply mistrusted the DeVoses’ intentions. There was a sense that the entire event rode on the backs of hopeful artists, who paid their travel costs out of pocket or did their own fund-raising via Kickstarter. (An economic impact study of the 2011 ArtPrize found it had generated $15.4 million in economic activity for Grand Rapids—not a bad return on DeVos’s investment.) It made the model seem not dissimilar from Amway, whose hopeful salespeople frequently receive very little recompense. ArtPrize could be seen as exploiting artists’ ambitions to generate cultural capital.

The DeVoses, Pfleghaar felt, were oligarchs who treated Grand Rapids like a "playtown." (They had recently received the permission of zoning officials to put a helicopter landing pad on the grounds at one of their mansions.) Pfleghaar also suspected ArtPrize was somehow part of their shadowy conservative cultural agenda. Pfleghaar is gay, and his suspicions were compounded by the fact that the extended DeVos family funded anti-gay-marriage ballot measures across the country.

"He’s a nice guy," Pfleghaar said of Rick. "Everyone tells me his heart’s in the right place. I don’t really know the guy. But Rick’s money is their money to me. He was born into this fortune."

Through the crowd I spotted the man himself with his parents. I heard later that several bodyguards—"Blackwater types," though who knows—were covering the building entrances and standing point by their Bentley parked in a side alley. Rick’s father, Dick, in a sharp suit and sharper part, was the Platonic ideal of a CEO-yachtsman. His mother, Betsy, looked 45 at most, as lithe and sleek as a blond Siamese cat. Maybe it was the way they carried themselves, but they seemed to radiate a certain aura, the crowd parting around them. Not regal, exactly. Elect.

By September 29, 370,309 votes had been cast, and DeVos held a press conference to announce the ten finalists. The public would have six days to choose the $250,000 winner. Among the chosen: Rusty, the giant found-object puppy; the even more giant welded-steel praying mantis; the Tim McGraw&#x2013;surfer Jesus mosaic; Gerald Ford; a crying octopus carved out of driftwood; a collection of chain-saw-carved bears; and a living statue of the sort you see in the piazzas of Europe, a dude dressed like a construction worker, covered in copper body paint and standing atop a scaffold.

The general critical consensus was that Rick DeVos’s grand experiment in letting public opinion determine the outcome had yielded up a torrent of kitsch—the "crazy crap" he’d asked for. Twitter was not kind. "Looks like the DeVos family is going to be seriously overpaying for some bad art. #artprize." "Before announcing the #ArtPrize Top 10, Rick DeVos said it is not about the Top 10. I now understand why he said that."

I found Paul Amenta in the dark and empty Site:Lab a few days later. Not a single Site:Lab piece had made the cut. "Don’t even get me started," he said, shaking his head. "I had this moment where I had to switch gears, ’cause if I didn’t I would go crazy." He had dedicated months of his life to preparing the space and persuading artists to come exhibit. I asked him if he’d try again, and he laughed bitterly. "I couldn’t get the artists to commit to a thing like this, given what happened with the voting."

This was exactly what he meant when he talked about the public fucking it up. He told me when DeVos had made the top ten announcement, the skies over Grand Rapids had blackened, and a windstorm with thunder and lightning had swept through the town. "It was freaky. Like God was registering disapproval or something."

Alois Kronschlaeger looked up through the darkened warehouse at Spire. "I’m disappointed, but my work was never about the public. I go back to New York with my integrity intact." Somehow we started talking about what the piece would look like if he torched it. He looked up at Spire wistfully. "Watching it burn would be amazing."

By the last day of voting, the mannerisms and theater of electoral politics had completely taken over the ten finalists. They were nearly all there, pressing the flesh with voters in a feverish run-up to the close of polls. Many were swarmed by children seeking autographs, perhaps a unique development in the history of art. One kid rushed up to me with a pen and paper, asking if I was an artist.

Mia Tavonatti, who had made the mosaic of Christ and driven it there in a moving truck from California, estimated she had scrawled 5,000 autographs in the previous week. A blonde 47-year-old who had grown up in northern Michigan, she was defiant toward the flood of online criticism. "Anyone who says that I may be pandering to the voters, they don’t know me, they have no idea." She spoke of the piece as "Him," as though it were a living person—not her friend Chris, the surfer, who had posed for it on a cross of Home Depot lumber, but an incarnation of the Lord Himself.

The living statue, who had been doing twelve-hour days on display, took a break to hydrate with Gatorade. His name was Robert Shangle, and he seemed wounded by the mockery he’d gotten. "There’s this question what I do isn’t considered art," he said, staring at me unnervingly through his copper-colored contact lenses. "Actually, it’s ironic, because my form of art is centuries old. It’s, forgive my French..." (Here I expected him to say, "Real fucking art, assholes.") "...a tableau vivant."

Sunti Pichetchaiyakul, the Gerald Ford sculptor, meanwhile, was busy trying to salvage an ancillary piece he’d been live-sculpting for the crowds, a clay bust of Betty Ford. The first lady had dried out, her toothy grin and immaculate coiffure cracking to pieces. Even if he didn’t win, however, he hoped the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation might consider purchasing his sculpture of the president.

All politicking and criticism aside, there was something contagious about the excitement of the crowds, entire families of ordinary Michiganders asked perhaps for the first time in their lives to appraise a work of art. Wandering the exhibit halls, I felt a weird, almost patriotic lump in my throat. Conversations about art were everywhere: At Starbucks the baristas talked about getting off work early enough to hit the museum. A throng of third graders tussled before a huge collage of the Chicago El, their harried teacher shouting, "What’s the medium?" To which a clever one responded, "Duct tape!" I watched a man in a plaid shirt and unironic trucker hat lean in close to an oil painting and scratch it, curiously, with his thumbnail.

Late that night I met Kronschlaeger and Amenta for drinks with some of their friends, and the conversation ranged around the likely outcome of the vote[, in a boozy wake of self-pity and frustration at the demise of public taste. "If I never hear the fucking word conversation again it’ll be too soon," someone muttered, darkly. No matter how many times DeVos insisted it wasn’t about the winner, it was still about the winner in the end. "As long as no serious art wins, I’m okay," said Kronschlaeger. "On the other hand, if the crying octopus wins, nobody wins." Surfer Jesus was no better.

Amenta stared up at the ceiling, deep in contemplation, then spoke with a tone of deadly-serious conviction. "Rusty. It’s got to be Rusty. It’s the only one with any heart."

Kronschlaeger agreed. The junk-sculpture puppy did have an undeniable sort of playfulness and dynamism.

"Rusty’s my horse," said Amenta. He asked me which work I had voted for. It was about three minutes to midnight, when the voting would end. I realized, through a haze of martinis, that not only had I not voted, I had not even gone online to confirm my registration.[How can one hope to comment with any authority on the validity of a democratic process and stand idly aside while it unfolds? Journalistic impartiality or no, I had as much a right as anyone to cast my vote for the winner. I wanted to join the conversation, too. I fumbled with my phone, drunkenly trying to log on to the ArtPrize website as the seconds ticked away. Kronschlaeger and Amenta were right: It must be Rusty. That puppy was all heart. But my voice was not to be heard. By the time I reached the voting page, it was 12:01 a.m. The polls were closed.

The following night, there was a sold-out gala awards ceremony at the DeVos Performance Hall. A dance troupe did a snappy Jazz Age number, though there was some problem with the timing of the curtain, and it closed on them in the middle of their bows. The eight jury prizes, $7,000 in a range of categories, were handed out—a sort of bone thrown to the arbiters of critical taste and judgment. In a surprise and unorthodox move, the administrators had at the last minute added a special juried category, Outstanding Venue. Site:Lab, though snubbed by the voting public, was given the nod.

Finally the moment arrived. Rick DeVos took the stage. He first addressed the grumbling over the top ten. "I see dissent and discord as functions of a larger narrative," he said, reading from a teleprompter screen that scrolled in the back of the auditorium. "This tension between populism and professionalism is at the core of ArtPrize." Where else would the front page of a local newspaper or half a TV news broadcast discuss contemporary art every day for two weeks? This was the real point of the endeavor, DeVos argued, not the winner. And then he opened the envelope.

"And the moment you’ve all been waiting for...Mia Tavonatti, Crucifixion!" The crowd erupted in thunderous applause. Kronschlaeger, sitting next to me, shook his head and slumped in his seat. "It’s a disaster."

At the press conference afterward, two local reporters joked to each other, "They should rename it PanderFest. Next year I’m submitting a painting of Jesus, Gerald Ford, and Rick DeVos."

Two months later, DeVos would announce that for 2012 a $100,000 juried prize would be added to the contest. The top prize would be reduced to $200,000 and would still be up to public vote, but it was hard not to see the change as at least a partial concession that the experiment, in its purest free-market form, had failed. The chasm between DeVos’s Silicon Valley&#x2013;like faith in the wisdom of crowdsourcing and his stated love for creative expression is wide, and perhaps no amount of money, however innovative its disbursement, can span it. If you ask the crowd what pleases them most, you get crowd-pleasing dreck.

Another view: If it really is Rick’s "creative act," perhaps ArtPrize is a masterful piece of performance art, a carnivalesque happening of the sort Warhol would have loved, sly and subversive precisely because of its preposterous openness, a giant papier-m&#xE2;ché middle finger rising out of flyover country, gesturing toward the bastions of the elite. But who is DeVos fighting for? It is not yet clear whether he really shares the cultural agenda laid out by Rich and Dick before him. Is ArtPrize his elaborate way of becoming his own person, of working within a system of interfamilial patronage while subverting its more controlling aims? Or will Rick, at some point, tuck in his shirt, comb his hair down, and assume the mantle of his station?

At the afterparty, in the gargantuan DeVos Place ballroom, I caught one last glimpse of him. Standing alone beside an ice sculpture bearing the ArtPrize logo—which, finished hours earlier, had begun to melt—he was bopping along halfheartedly to "Come On Eileen" and drinking a Stella Artois as a thickset bodyguard stood silently by.

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